My Heart Is High Above
by Laqueus
Summary: "It is only later, as you watch the firebird loft on smoke-touched wings, that you realise you were wrong. About everything." [Tremily, vague Firelight spoilers]


_AN: Prepare for melodrama._

oOoOo

 _I._

You do not believe in giving your heart away. As a matter of fact you do not believe in it as a concept, full stop. It seems much too fanciful, too foolish, an idea that only lives and thrives between sheaves of paper, bred there by some mooning poet. What world do they inhabit, too lost among their own words and quills, to think that such a thing were even possible? To affix your happiness on another, letting their capricious whims and moods affect your own emotional state? Fanciful claptrap, written for moonstruck lovers who thrive on such schmaltz. You have had something of yours kept within the clutches of another, and it is not an experience you would recommend; your own mind, spirited away by an amorphous wraith for far more years than you care to remember. Sometimes the silence in your head is unbearable, as if some firm fixture of your mind is now missing. Sometimes you awake and instinctively freeze, waiting for insidious commands to slip into the crevices in your brain, coming from someone who no longer exists.

Stars, foist that ordeal upon the poets, then see if they are as eager to fill reams of paper with such nonsense about giving your heart to another.

To give a heart, ha! Yours is safely locked away, buried under years of strata deposited there by abuse.

You have said it before, and you will say it again.

You do not believe in giving your heart away.

 _II._

It is only later, as you watch the firebird loft skywards on smoke-touched wings, that you realise you were wrong. About everything.

How else can you explain the ragged and gaping hole torn open in your chest, neatly lined with shards of glass? Even though you are bobbing in ice-cold water that sluggishly saps your strength and threatens to drag you under, somehow the hollow pain within you outstrips it, overshadows it; what other reason can be given?

In that moment, afloat in the sea, you fully comprehend. She did not steal your heart, fingers sliding sideways between your ribs to snatch what wasn't hers, no. You gave her your heart, and that makes it all the worse. You did not forcibly shove it at her, letting it latch on because of some meagre show of interest or paltry display of kindness; neither did you give it to her in chunks, like some broken pot to be reassembled. Instead you slowly slipped it to her over the years, sliver by sliver, shred by shred, unaware and unknown, until she held it in its entirety between her palms, complete once more. Until this moment, you did not know.

Now you understand, and it is too late.

Only now do you find the truth in the words of poets; all at once you simultaneously wish to bite your tongue in frustration and thank them for putting words to what you feel.

She holds your heart, and you find you have little desire to try and wrest it back from her. Oh, you feel like an embarrassment wrapped in elven skin; despite all your past bluster and bravado you have trodden along the path you had forsworn, and what's more, have found that you enjoy the view.

She is a bright spark against the night sky, wrapped in arcane magic. For a just a heartbeat you swear that you can see your heart clutched in her talons; the next second a shiver racks your body, dispelling the fantasy. The choppy sea is slowly strengthening her grip on you, a speck amidst her waves.

The Luna Moth lifts you to safety not long after, before the sea can claim victory by drawing you down into her murky depths.

Ha, but what can the sea ever do to you now? Even if you had sank, it could never, _can_ never truly claim you, not as long as your heart soars over the world, carried on bonfire wings.

 _III._

You set out to fight her, because of course you do. You are almost seized with an unhinged desire to laugh maniacally; in a life characterised by the sharp edges of conflict, endlessly looping in an ouroboros that repeatedly brings battle to the fore, why had you expected anything different? What shield, what shelter was there for the realm of love, and why had you expected there to be one present?

With weariness weighing down your limbs, you prepare, ready to solve the problem in the only way you know how. You suspect that your heart would be heavy, but it is no longer present in your chest; there is only a chasm, yawning and terrible in the way it echoes.

You will fight her, the one who clutches onto your heart with talons as bright as the sun, and you know better than any that doing so will kill you in more ways than one. But you must try, for to give up without any sort of attempt does a disservice to you both. Even though her true self sleeps, secreted away in some inaccessible domain, you know she would never forgive you. You, for that matter, would never forgive yourself.

Regardless of your preparations and precautions, you cannot help but be aware of some vague premonition telling you that the event will end in tragedy; it looms in the future like an unseen iceberg in mist, its full extent and shape obscured. You know this because there is a single fact lurking at the back of your mind, sitting under the surface in waters deep and foreboding, where few thoughts can reach. It nestles there, making a mockery out of all your intentions and plans, turning them into little more than a charade. You are a dead man walking, merely acting out a part with heavy, corpselike hands.

For the truth of it is this:

Your heart sits wreathed in flames, and if extinguishing it means extinguishing her, then you would rather gladly let it burn to ash within her fiery grip.

oOoOo

 _AN: Although I write my stories for myself, this one is especially so; I've been frustrated with a personal project and writing this was a way of blowing off steam. It's overly melodramatic and flowery, but I don't care._

 _The title is taken from the anonymous 16th century poem: "My Heart Is High Above"_


End file.
